I keep wondering why, the day it happened, they didn't hire a crack team of scuba divers to go down there with a hunk of steel and oxy-acetalyne torches to weld it shut. I don't think oil would burn underwater, even in the presence of the torches, though whether you could pull off a weld is an open question.
Holding something in place over the opening long enough to attach it is a significant problem, since the oil's coming out at thousands of psi. I don't think a diver would be able to do it without significant machinery, even if it were somewhere shallower where divers can work.
Edit: Which actually is why blowout preventers were invented in the 1920s, even for land-based wells. Before that, oil would gush out of the opening when a high-pressure reservoir was struck, and it was really hard to shove a cap onto a well once it was spewing out at high pressure. This one in 1910 took 18 months to cap: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeview_Gusher
Interesting. I guess I need to learn more about oil mining tech. I was under the impression that after the initial strike, most of the pressure is released- hence the pumps we use to extract it.
Think about this for a moment: The area you are talking about is very deep under water, a column of 1600 meters, then there is a very large layer of rock. All that stuff weighs down on the saturated rock/oil underneath, and then you poke a hole in that hard top layer of rock.
The pressures we're talking about are immense, so high that methane in spite of the temperature is a solid.
Containing the pressure is the problem.
The only places where pumps are needed to get oil out of the ground are shallow wells, especially in a newly drilled well the pressure will almost always be 'on'.
The deeper we drill, the higher that initial pressure will be.
Over time, as the well is depleted the pressure can go down, and depending on the substrate the oil is in (usually some kind of porous rock, it's not quite drilling in to a lake of oil down there) this will happen faster or slower.
Once a well is 'depleted' the rule is really that there is still plenty of oil down there but it can't be moved to the surface economically. There is plenty of research in this area (such as controlled burns to use the gas pressure from the burn to push the oil to a collecting well), but simply pumping it out is usually not the way things go.
My personal big fear about this particular 'gusher' is that the longer it lasts the more the oil under pressure has to erode the wellhead, if it gets to the point where it starts widening the well head (like say the tip of a plasma cutter that is used a bit too long) that the cavity will get larger than what can be plugged up.
Really, it surprises me that just knowing the basic facts of the case you would make this suggestion.
5000 feet below sea level has conditions that make working there in a suit comparable to (or worse than) setting up a deep space mission. We're talking about a column of a mile or about 1600 meters of standing water here. A scuba diver would be crushed like a pop can at that depth.
Sending people that deep without protection around them to withstand pressures that are beyond our everyday imagination would be the same as killing them on the spot.
There has never been a human that deep, unless in a device called a 'Bathyscaphe', and even that is quite an undertaking, and definitely not without risk.
To describe a little bit better my sentiment- they are an oil giant with tons of cash facing a crisis. I'd have expected a faster reaction. I'm aware it's not an easy task, but they hardly lack resources. I was chalking the slow movement up to bureaucracy.
There is a crack team of scientists on the project now who have no idea what to do. BP is fucked, and they know it. It doesn't matter how fast they didn't respond because nobody inside of BP or otherwise knows how to fix the problem.
Let me put it this way: if you have any BP stock I suggest you sell it, and if you plan on eating fish in the next 10 years start your prayer wheels and hope that someone comes up with something really smart that hasn't been tried and discarded yet. If you live in the south-east of the United States and you have survived hurricane Katerina then I really sympathize because nobody should have to live through one, let alone two disasters of this magnitude in a single lifetime.
Out of control doesn't begin to describe the problems they are having there.
They can hardly plug the hole with cash, that's not the problem. The problem is a viable solution.
When someone suggests exploding a nuke to see if that will cure it and he's not immediately sent off to the funny farm you know there is a real problem. Especially when you think of what could happen if that option were to fail.
It does seem like they could have done a better job at having tools like submarines and containment devices nearby and ready to go for cases like these. They should consider it a cost of doing business, to be ready to move quickly when the need arises. It does seem like one of the most critical factors effecting how much damage is going to be done to the environment and to their balance sheet is how fast or slow they get the spill contained or stopped. Stopping it within a day or two after it started would yield a huge improvement over letting it go a month like this. Surely, from a dollar standpoint, better preparation makes sense, not even taking into account the ethics of it.
I also don't buy into the excuse about the physical constraints they're under in trying to stop it. Those physical constraints should have been known to them before they built the platform in the first place. They had plenty of time to analyze, prepare and invest in solutions for a failure scenario like this. Deep water? Yep, that was pretty obvious before they built the thing. Oil would come out at high pressure? Yep, that was knowable beforehand too. Divers can't operate at that depth, only machines? Ditto.
Scapegoating is really easy in cases like this, after the fact everybody, including BP knows how it should have been done instead, but we are where we are.
Every time something like this happens we learn, and this time it may well prove a lesson so expensive that there will be a moratorium on this kind of operation in the future, simply because the cost of any failure is higher than what we as a species, and as stewards of the planet can afford.
Even the drilling of the relief well is not 100% sure to work, the timescale on which it is happening is slow enough that significant damage to the ecology around that leak, and possibly much more than that will occur.
I hesitate to even speculate about how bad this could get.
But given the fact that there always was a risk the only question you can ask is how much difference any of that would have made and the answer is probably not very much.
This is uncharted territory, and as much as I'm pissed off that this happened (because I don't think they should be drilling there in the first place!) I'm not going to point the finger and say they could have done that much better.
Anybody that thinks they could have done better should start a deep sea drilling company tomorrow.
The folks that built the well and platform, who made the mistake that caused the explosion, and the folks who failed to quickly seal/stop/contain the leak are clearly at fault. I think the issue is whether if a company thinks it is smart enough to start a deep sea oil drilling operation (BP/Transocean/Halliburton) that it should also be smart enough to have a tested plan in place to quickly seal a leak -- at any depth they operate it. The argument being if they want to build a well that would be too deep to stop a leak like this, and yet, somehow not too deep enough to build the well in the first place, that they should not build the well there, period.
For example, one of my assumptions based on the physics/engineering I do know is that it should be possible to build a simulated leak contraption, at that depth. And then they could run experiments where they try to stop the leak. Since it would be a controlled experiment they could have control valves to turn on/off the flow of oil (or whatever alternate liquid they use), but the key element is that the contraption has a part where it just gushes out thousands of barrels of the oil-like substance, under conditions as close to a real leak as possible. Test, measure, do post-mortems, tweak and fine-tune their plans and gadgets. Then, disseminate a plan, train people, have tools and gadgets cached reasonably nearby all such wells they operate, and be able to move in and take decisive action to seal the leak within the first few days. "Go big" if necessary to seal it. Just do it, quickly, because time is of the essence. Have backup procedures also in place, ready to go, with all necessary gadgets and trained folks nearby and ready to go quickly. I do also assume that a company that makes billions in profit each quarter would have enough money to do all of this.
I'm mad at them and I am willing to point a finger because I find it really hard to believe they could not have done much better. The combination of brainstorming failure scenarios, testing, planning and having billions of dollars to spend on tech and people should have taken them a lot farther, I think. I just don't buy this "we have enough brains and money to build this thing, but not enough brains and money to fix it when it goes bad" argument. The first buys the second, as a general rule. And they've had plenty of time to prepare for the second.
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 48.4 ms ] threadEdit: Which actually is why blowout preventers were invented in the 1920s, even for land-based wells. Before that, oil would gush out of the opening when a high-pressure reservoir was struck, and it was really hard to shove a cap onto a well once it was spewing out at high pressure. This one in 1910 took 18 months to cap: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeview_Gusher
The pressures we're talking about are immense, so high that methane in spite of the temperature is a solid.
Containing the pressure is the problem.
The only places where pumps are needed to get oil out of the ground are shallow wells, especially in a newly drilled well the pressure will almost always be 'on'.
The deeper we drill, the higher that initial pressure will be.
Over time, as the well is depleted the pressure can go down, and depending on the substrate the oil is in (usually some kind of porous rock, it's not quite drilling in to a lake of oil down there) this will happen faster or slower.
Once a well is 'depleted' the rule is really that there is still plenty of oil down there but it can't be moved to the surface economically. There is plenty of research in this area (such as controlled burns to use the gas pressure from the burn to push the oil to a collecting well), but simply pumping it out is usually not the way things go.
My personal big fear about this particular 'gusher' is that the longer it lasts the more the oil under pressure has to erode the wellhead, if it gets to the point where it starts widening the well head (like say the tip of a plasma cutter that is used a bit too long) that the cavity will get larger than what can be plugged up.
http://www.scubarecords.com/
Really, it surprises me that just knowing the basic facts of the case you would make this suggestion.
5000 feet below sea level has conditions that make working there in a suit comparable to (or worse than) setting up a deep space mission. We're talking about a column of a mile or about 1600 meters of standing water here. A scuba diver would be crushed like a pop can at that depth.
Sending people that deep without protection around them to withstand pressures that are beyond our everyday imagination would be the same as killing them on the spot.
There has never been a human that deep, unless in a device called a 'Bathyscaphe', and even that is quite an undertaking, and definitely not without risk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste
'regular' submarines will go to about 4500' and are pretty much useless in this case.
Too many hollywood movies.
To describe a little bit better my sentiment- they are an oil giant with tons of cash facing a crisis. I'd have expected a faster reaction. I'm aware it's not an easy task, but they hardly lack resources. I was chalking the slow movement up to bureaucracy.
Out of control doesn't begin to describe the problems they are having there.
They can hardly plug the hole with cash, that's not the problem. The problem is a viable solution.
When someone suggests exploding a nuke to see if that will cure it and he's not immediately sent off to the funny farm you know there is a real problem. Especially when you think of what could happen if that option were to fail.
I also don't buy into the excuse about the physical constraints they're under in trying to stop it. Those physical constraints should have been known to them before they built the platform in the first place. They had plenty of time to analyze, prepare and invest in solutions for a failure scenario like this. Deep water? Yep, that was pretty obvious before they built the thing. Oil would come out at high pressure? Yep, that was knowable beforehand too. Divers can't operate at that depth, only machines? Ditto.
Every time something like this happens we learn, and this time it may well prove a lesson so expensive that there will be a moratorium on this kind of operation in the future, simply because the cost of any failure is higher than what we as a species, and as stewards of the planet can afford.
Even the drilling of the relief well is not 100% sure to work, the timescale on which it is happening is slow enough that significant damage to the ecology around that leak, and possibly much more than that will occur.
I hesitate to even speculate about how bad this could get.
But given the fact that there always was a risk the only question you can ask is how much difference any of that would have made and the answer is probably not very much.
This is uncharted territory, and as much as I'm pissed off that this happened (because I don't think they should be drilling there in the first place!) I'm not going to point the finger and say they could have done that much better.
Anybody that thinks they could have done better should start a deep sea drilling company tomorrow.
For example, one of my assumptions based on the physics/engineering I do know is that it should be possible to build a simulated leak contraption, at that depth. And then they could run experiments where they try to stop the leak. Since it would be a controlled experiment they could have control valves to turn on/off the flow of oil (or whatever alternate liquid they use), but the key element is that the contraption has a part where it just gushes out thousands of barrels of the oil-like substance, under conditions as close to a real leak as possible. Test, measure, do post-mortems, tweak and fine-tune their plans and gadgets. Then, disseminate a plan, train people, have tools and gadgets cached reasonably nearby all such wells they operate, and be able to move in and take decisive action to seal the leak within the first few days. "Go big" if necessary to seal it. Just do it, quickly, because time is of the essence. Have backup procedures also in place, ready to go, with all necessary gadgets and trained folks nearby and ready to go quickly. I do also assume that a company that makes billions in profit each quarter would have enough money to do all of this.
I'm mad at them and I am willing to point a finger because I find it really hard to believe they could not have done much better. The combination of brainstorming failure scenarios, testing, planning and having billions of dollars to spend on tech and people should have taken them a lot farther, I think. I just don't buy this "we have enough brains and money to build this thing, but not enough brains and money to fix it when it goes bad" argument. The first buys the second, as a general rule. And they've had plenty of time to prepare for the second.